Registering a Domain Name Forever

The official ICANN has responses to general questions, and the answer to “How long does a registration last? Can it be renewed?” is:

Each registrar has the flexibility to offer initial and renewal registrations in one-year increments, provided that the maximum remaining unexpired term shall not exceed ten years.

With some creative work on a registrar’s part (registrar = the online store that provides domain registration), it may be possible for a registrar to auto-renew a domain’s registration beyond the 10-year maximum, but that would have to be managed at the registrar and wouldn’t be part of the domain’s authoritative records at the registry.

At the time of this post, there’s one registrar called Epik.com that offers a forever domain name registration for .BIZ, .COM, .INFO, .NET, .ORG (how? After you add an available domain name to your shopping cart, on the checkout page, use the pull down to select years of registration), where registrants could register and get a perpetual domain registration.

The only information that could be found is this… excerpted from Forever Domain Renewal/Registration (One Time Fee) via Epik?

Is this too good to be true? Or is this the best offer ever in the world of domaining? I recently received an e-mail from a certain Jessica Roberts of Epik, offering a domain renewal FOREVER! Yes guys and gals, you heard it right. You’ll never renew your domain ever again. Even if the ICANN fees increase yearly and the domain renewal in your favorite registrars increase, you don’t need to worry about it, because you own your domain forever.

I’m pretty skeptic about this and I don’t know if I can trust another registrar with my domain. There are a lot of risk that came to my mind if I renew my domain with them forever. They can actually lock it in their registrar and claim it as their own, or they can just not renew it because I’m already dead, and a whole lot of other things. For $420 USD, you can own your beloved domain forever. If the domain renewal price is only $10, then it means you can have the domain for 42 years. They will be paying it for 42 years and will continue renewing it forever, until the end of time. This is a very high risk of investment for Epik and I don’t know how will they make money out of it.